Review by Dan Backman published in the Swedish newspaper Svenska
Dagbladet (SvD) on July 30th 2003.

CHIC performed at the Stockholm Jazz
Festival on Tuesday night at 10:15 PM, July 29th 2003

INCREDIBLY GOOD WITH THE KING OF DISCO MUSIC

The smartest, most stylish and grooviest disco music
the world has ever known was heard over Skeppsholmen (island) on tuesday
when Chic performed with Nile Rodgers.

On Monday night Nile Rodgers walked around the festival
area like an ordinary visitor. He ate hot dogs and listened to Roy Hargrove,
like everybody else. A day later he's leading a band of whitedressed aliens
onto the stage. They're all from Planet Disco. Their mission: to seduce
our minds and bodies with the smartest, most stylish and grooviest disco
music the world has ever known. An elegant and complex music aimed towards
the intellectual sense just as well as the sexual.

This is their first ever visit to Sweden and, despite
the fact that Swedish rock critics can't understand this, it is an event
completely in parity with the recent visits by Bruce Springsteen and the
Rolling Stones. The Skeppsholmen (Jazz Festival) audience knows that Nile
Rodgers and Bernard Edwards importance to black and white pop music can't
be overrated and from the start the love flows to and from the stage. With
the password "Yowsah, Yowsah, Yowsah" the floodgates open for
a hedonistic dance music which in its manic exstatic relentlessness almost
becomes shamanistic. It is incredibly good.

The track list is unbeatable. Excepting the overexposed
'We Are Family', which was written for Sister Sledge, the classicals line
up; "Le Freak", "Dance, dance, dance", "I want
your love", "Good Times". The fact that guitarist Nile Rodgers
is the only one left from the good old days doesn't really matter. Of course
his partner, bassplayer Bernard Edwards (who died in 1996) is missed, but
his place is satisfactorily filled by Jerry Barnes. The best part is that
the vocal performances work at least as well as before. The three singers
do their vocal parts with precisely the accuracy and soulfulness which
is required.

If you want to go looking for weaknesses, the band
presentation is too long. This is music built on collective rather than
individual performances, so why waste time on silly little solo's which
doesn't come near jazz festival standard anyway? Yes, the collective also
includes the audience; to clap your hands to the beat can often be a bit
awkward, here it is a necessity. (translated by
pocat)